They are fair, indeed. If I had to answer them, I could only offer my best guess, based on what I've repeatedly read on the Internet: Only devices that have the Google market count. So no, Kindle Fire and forked Chinese Android don't get counted -- not just in the sense "we don't report those numbers", but rather "we don't get these numbers in, we have no idea how much they are, and we don't include them in the 700 000 activations per day".

When you activate an Android device you go through a specific discrete step where you connect to Google's servers and get your account activated. On a side note, I know a lot of people with decent mid-range Android phones, who use them as feature phones and have never registered with Google or activated the device.

That sounds reasonable.

Here's another question: Does Schmidt mean an average per day or simply that on a day or a couple days they hit 700k? This is typically expressed to mean for each day to express rate but without a time frame qualifier it's still fishy. Here's what Jobs said during a previous conference call.

Quote:

"What about Google? Eric Schmidt said they're activating 200,000 devices per day and 90,000 apps in their store. Apple activating 275,000 iOS devices a day on average for the last 30 days with a peak of 300,000 per day on some of those.

There is nothing ambiguous about Steve Jobs's comments. He's qualified every aspect to refer to the mean average.

This bot has been removed from circulation due to a malfunctioning morality chip.

If these numbers are to be believed and sustainable, 700,000 per day would be 252,000,000 per year. Thats more than Apple has in total iOS devices as of October. If thats the case then Apple should not be the number one phone on any network, but they are. How ODD!

Well, these claims are made by the same company that says they will be on every tv set within 6 months. Anything that comes out of this company has to be taken with a grain of salt. Let's just say Google likes to fudge numbers a bit, even with activations of millions of free phones.

Here's another question: Does Schmidt mean an average per day or simply that on a day or a couple days they hit 700k? This is typically expressed to mean for each day to express rate but without a time frame qualifier it's still fishy. Here's what Jobs said during a previous conference call.

There is nothing ambiguous about Steve Jobs's comments. He's qualified every aspect to refer to the mean average.

That's actually easy. Apple's activations seem to fluctuate less than 10% from the average, even though new announcements, price changes, etc. would have a major impact. In comparison, Google's activations come from many different companies and from a broad range of devices, making is less likely that they fluctuate as much. So, my guess would be that if 700 000 is a peak rather than an average, then the average should be not far from 650 000, or practically the same.

Those numbers seem a bit high to me. If you add the Android and Apple ones together that means a million people activating a new phone or tablet every damn day. How can that be right? How often do people replace their phones anyway?

Those numbers seem a bit high to me. If you add the Android and Apple ones together that means a million people activating a new phone or tablet every damn day. How can that be right? How often do people replace their phones anyway?

Just ask Apple with Macintosh vs Windows when Apple mad huge profits per product. What happened there? They lost. OSX and forced to switch to Intel chips to allow Windows to work on their hardware is what saved them. Yes Windows on a Mac. Pretty sad actually.

The Mac never had a share of the computer market comparable to that of the iPhone in the smart phone market. That's what you're missing. Think carefully about that and you'll realize your viewpoint is deeply flawed.

I've heard this before. Your comment is predicated on the myth that the Mac, at one point, had a massive market share vs. the PC, and that Microsoft took that away. Apple never had that to begin with. Apple's climb has been slow and steady over the decades. They never lost to Microsoft. They just didn't dominate out of the gate which some people interpret as failure.

The long-term story of the Mac is a stellar success, and if you genuinely think it's because Apple switched to Intel chips and everyone is buying Macs to run Windows, you're delusional.

The Mac never had a share of the computer market comparable to that of the iPhone in the smart phone market. That's what you're missing. Think carefully about that and you'll realize your viewpoint is deeply flawed.

I've heard this before. Your comment is predicated on the myth that the Mac, at one point, had a massive market share vs. the PC, and that Microsoft took that away. Apple never had that to begin with. Apple's climb has been slow and steady over the decades. They never lost to Microsoft. They just didn't dominate out of the gate which some people interpret as failure.

The long-term story of the Mac is a stellar success, and if you genuinely think it's because Apple switched to Intel chips and everyone is buying Macs to run Windows, you're delusional.

To back up your comments

Even before the Mac Apple never had a dominate market share.

This bot has been removed from circulation due to a malfunctioning morality chip.

What we still don't know about these numbers Google keeps tossing around is whether it includes all the forked versions of Android, including the Kindle Fire and Chinese android versions. If China is included in the numbers, then perhaps they make up more than 50% of these figures from Google. Which to the rest of the world does not matter since it's a forked version.

So am I. This should cut the number of rubbish comments about Android on AI at least in half. ... Why wouldn't Apple announce numbers anymore? A respectable second place is nothing to be shy about, especially as long as it brings most of the profits.

Its rubbish to compare one companies output with that of ten (or more) others.
Google can count the activations but thats all they are doing, Apple counts the activations and produces the devices. Thats something different.

It's not ridiculous. It's exactly as it was with the Mac back in the eighties. More profit doesn't mean success. It means failure in the end. Apple ended up with 1% market share. Niche player. They barely survived. Then again Apple seems to be happy with 1-3% share.

"Android's growth in the mobile device market has been exponential, steadily diminishing Java's share. For instance, Amazon's newly-released Kindle Fire tablet is based on Android, while prior versions of the Kindle were Java-based. Android has been gaining in other areas as well, with Android-based set-top boxes and even televisions appearing this year. These are markets where Java has traditionally been strong but is now losing ground to Android. The longer Android is allowed to continue fragmenting the Java ecosystem, the more serious the harm to Java becomes, and the more difficult it is to try to unwind. Oracle suffers harm in the form of lost licensing opportunities for its existing Java platform products, and the enterprise-wide harm from fragmentation of Java, which reduces the 'write once, run anywhere' capability that has historically provided Java such great value."

Better than my Bose, better than my Skullcandy's, listening to Mozart through my LeBron James limited edition PowerBeats by Dre is almost as good as my Sennheisers.

... But if Apple is the loser here, I need to reconsider losing. What other company has close to $100 billion in cash with zero debt?

The point is that the smartphone market is growing at an enormous rate and Apple is producing as fast as it can.
So in absolute numbers Apple is producing a huge amount of phones and much more than ever before.
When you compare Apples production growth (number of units) with that of 10 or more companies combined Apples growth is somewhat less ... and thats a shocker?

Well, now it's has come to the point that Apple cannot announce activation numbers anymore. Android is overtaking much faster than anyone anticipated. It seems as though Apple can never get ahead no matter what they produce. Except for iTunes and iPod, everything else flames out or ends up 2nd, 3rd or stuck as a niche player.

The local University gives out free condoms and birth control for students. Yet, people still go to the store and buy condoms and get birth control prescriptions.

In Android's case, they are stuffing each student with an Android phone when they register for class, yet people are buying iPhones and spending hundreds of dollars on apps, then buying Macs and iPads, to iPods for other aspects of their lifestyle and work.

Keep churning out one generic blob and call it Android for every cheap to expensive phone that runs some version of Android on it.

Developers will continue to move to iOS and it's going to reach a point that Google realizes that they have to change their model or they will become Nokia and all their claims for total smartphone sales will produce a loss on their balance sheet.

It's not ridiculous. It's exactly as it was with the Mac back in the eighties. More profit doesn't mean success. It means failure in the end. Apple ended up with 1% market share. Niche player. They barely survived. Then again Apple seems to be happy with 1-3% share.

More profit means failure???

Steve Job's vision was so forward thinking that he used to park in disabled spots before he became sick.

If Apple, Samsung, HTC, Motorola and Sony Erricsson have one factory each, each producing 1m phones, the market share would be:
Apple 20% Android 80%
But of course that would be an absurdly simplistic situation because each vendor could open more factories - right? And they could each do that at the same theoretical maximum speed, right? But in the real world you make the best product by marrying the best components, people and passion. Apple refuse to compromise on quality, so their growth rate is constrained. This is why there are lineups for new iPhones and iPads. So if Apple were to maintain a market share of 50% or greater they would either have to open more factories at a rate 4 times as fast as the 4 combined Android vendors (and I haven't even included amazon, LG or other vendors in my simple example) - which clearly isn't going to happen.
Alternatively, Apple have to hope people will wait for an iPhone rather than leave the store (temporarily) with a "good enough" Android phone. That isn't going to happen either in our consumer culture of immediate gratification.
I'll go out on a limb and say that the "true market share" of iPhone is actually the same as the iPad. About 60%. Because when the telecom companies and phone vendors are less involved in the transaction, as is the case in the tablet market, Apple sells the majority market share. This was also the case in the MP3 market. This is not true in the phone market, and so, even with new factories being planned or opened in Brazil or elsewhere, Apple will have a hard job ever matching Android sales numbers (unless more vendors follow Nokia to Windows Phone).
It's just logistics. And if Apple keeps opening new stores and factories and STILL keeps the Lion (pun intended) share of the profits, why should they care?

They are fair, indeed. If I had to answer them, I could only offer my best guess, based on what I've repeatedly read on the Internet: Only devices that have the Google market count. So no, Kindle Fire and forked Chinese Android don't get counted -- not just in the sense "we don't report those numbers", but rather "we don't get these numbers in, we have no idea how much they are, and we don't include them in the 700 000 activations per day".

When you activate an Android device you go through a specific discrete step where you connect to Google's servers and get your account activated. On a side note, I know a lot of people with decent mid-range Android phones, who use them as feature phones and have never registered with Google or activated the device.

"Only devices that have the Google market count"

well no , as it says in the OP

" For those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don't count re-sold devices), and "activations" means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service"

that is not the same as google marketplace.

and if that is the case, then any android fork could be counted, which is a pretty big variation as was seen in these figures .

does that mean connecting to a network ? or subscribing to a mobile plan ? you don't subscribe to to google marketplace you create an account, you subscribe generally using money which would point to a mobile plan.

Since they are rumored to be making $5-$15 per device that should amount to hundreds of millions a year for the device makers they have license agreements with.

That would be hundreds of millions more than what Google is making even if you count mobile ad revenue from Android devices.

Great business model. I guess they are making the same bet as Amazon with the Fire. In some distant future the profit should start pouring in. The questions is how long it will take and how many Android device makers that will still be left by then?

Let them fabricate or embellish all they want. What they continue to not release is the actual balance sheet results.

See the other thing that doesn't make sense to me is Google is basically implying they're activating more Android devices a year than all iPod devices (in all their various iterations) Apple has sold in it's entire history.

Let's think of it this way ... how many people do you know that DON'T have, or have never had an iPod? Pretty much everyone has, or at one point had an iPod. Now how many people do you know with an Android device? Sure, you might see them here and there, but they're nowhere nearly as ubiquitous ... which really makes me question their activation numbers, because if they were true almost EVERYONE would have an Android phone ... and that just isn't even remotely close to reality (I also realize these number represent world sales ... not just US sales, but still ...).

MacVicta askes "What exactly counts as an Android device? Does it include the Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook Color?"

Do these count for the activations? What about forked versions of Android in China?

Those are fair questions.

When Google announced 500K activations per day back in June they clarified that the only devices counted included devices that run Google services. We've discussed that here a few times already. So a Chinese fork of Android or the versions used by the Fire and Nook Color who don’t license Google services would not be counted.

Here's another question: Does Schmidt mean an average per day or simply that on a day or a couple days they hit 700k? This is typically expressed to mean for each day to express rate but without a time frame qualifier it's still fishy. Here's what Jobs said during a previous conference call.

There is nothing ambiguous about Steve Jobs's comments. He's qualified every aspect to refer to the mean average.

Solipsism, Andy Rubin was perfectly clear about that months ago. It was never one day. His tweet announcing 500K was "there are now 500K Android devices activated every day, and it's growing at 4.4% w/w".

Actually Apple's % of all mobile profits last quarter dropped from 57% to 52% while Android's rose 12% to near 40%. After this 700K figure, I would not be surprised if Android is sucking up more % of mobile profits than Apple after the Q4 results. They are growing super fast while Apple has flat lined for almost a year now.

Google doesn't make any money on Android. They make money selling advertising. Their mobile profits include ads on iOS and Android, of course they don't break it down that way.

Personally, I'm shocked that people don't mind being food for Google's real customers. All Google is interested in is harvesting your data so they can sell it to advertisers. That's how they make their money. Why do you think Google offers so many "free products and services"? They want to keep you lined up at their troughs.

With all of talk about personal privacy these days, how does this get overlooked? The only answer is that some people want free above all and they're willing to give up their personal data to get it.

Clearly Apple is not perfect, but I am much more comfortable being Apple's end customer, than I am about being food for Google's end customers.

See the other thing that doesn't make sense to me is Google is basically implying they're activating more Android devices a year than all iPod devices (in all their various iterations) Apple has sold in it's entire history.

Let's think of it this way ... how many people do you know that DON'T have, or have never had an iPod? Pretty much everyone has, or at one point had an iPod. Now how many people do you know with an Android device? Sure, you might see them here and there, but they're nowhere nearly as ubiquitous ... which really makes me question their activation numbers, because if they were true almost EVERYONE would have an Android phone ... and that just isn't even remotely close to reality (I also realize these number represent world sales ... not just US sales, but still ...).

I really hope you're not employed in a field that deals with math. Even at 700K activations a day, that's only around 255 million phones a year. Or about 60 million less than just the U.S. population. Factor in that the world population is over 6 billion and you've got plenty of room for the number to be correct. Feel free to continue to disbelieve it, but it would be foolish of Google to announce something like that without it being true.

And if you're going to throw anecdotal nonsense into the mix, I happen to know a lot more Android users than iPhone users. A large portion of my family uses Android but I think only one person has an iPhone (I have an HP/Palm Pre 2 for the record).

it's probably when people first activate Android, they get frustrated and then return it and get another Android device activated. So maybe some of those activations are "repeat" customers.

Read the AI article here. 3rd paragraph:"For those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don't count re-sold devices), and "activations" means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service."

"Repeats" aren't included. Nor presumably are tablets or other devices that don't subscribe to a wireless service, aka Wi-Fi only. Yup, all 10K wi-fi Android tablets sold not shipped are excluded from the count figures. Figured I'd get that part in and save the time and trouble for some others to make the comment.

Well that really depends. Comparing a Hyundai Genesis R Spec with a base model C class (or any C class sans the C63), I would definitely rather drive the Hyundai. (Car analogies don't really work when comparing computers)

it's probably when people first activate Android, they get frustrated and then return it and get another Android device activated. So maybe some of those activations are "repeat" customers.

Yes and don't forget that with iPhones as with Macs - even the oldest original iPhones shipped are still out there - maybe only being used as iPods - but still out there - compared to a couple people who I know who are on their third Android device as a result of loss or failure of the device.

It would not surprise me at all if 90% of all iPhones ever shipped are still in use in some fashion - and that maybe 50% of Android devices shipped are still in use.

My original iPhone 2G is now an iPod for my niece - my iPhone 4 32GB is now my wife's and her iPhone 4 16GB is now my sister's and I have a new iPhone 4S 64GB.

Just as with PCs - Macs tend to live much longer useful lives than their Windows counterparts - especially when you factor in things like corporate leases which tend to be 3 years - meaning that while the Mac in the creative department might be used for 5 or 6 years - the PCs in accounting get replaced every 3 years even if there is nothing wrong with them.

As to activation numbers - aren't there now 7 billion people on the planet? if you divide that by 365 you get about 19 million - and if only 1% of all people were to get a new phone on any given day that is still almost 2 million people per day.

If I am doing the math right - starting with the same 7 billion people - and 1% of all of them getting a new phone every 2 years is still almost 1 million a day.

Apple's 300,000 per day number that was mentioned is only 0.004% of the world's population.

Even if you war to consider the population of the US only - about 300 million - 300,000 per day is still only 0.1% of that figure. just pointing out that a number such as 1 million phones a day being activated between Apple and Android combined - is not that big a number when you consider that is only about 1% of world population.

...
we need more definition on "subscribing to a wireless service",
...

We don't need any definitions, but only to have basic knowledge about Google services, and to think for a second.

With his statement, Rubin was not addressing which devices count, but whether they get counted more than once upon reactivation, upgrade, etc. This needed to be addressed since there are many morons around who insist that merely restarting my phone counts as an activation. Rubin, however, did not try to provide a definition as to what Google does and does not count, since he likely doesn't care about the non-Google Android devices -- as I stated previously, my contention is that Google doesn't see them, cannot count them, and wouldn't bother talking about them in press releases.

When talking about "subscribing to a wireless service", Rubin was specifically addressing phones under contract, which is IMO quite inaccurate. Two examples to show how:
1. A friend of mine has an Android phone under contract but doesn't use Google's services and has not activated them on the phone (he enjoys charging his phone once every 4 days, and turning all the services on would shave off a day or two of battery time, so I respect his backwards choice).
2. I purchased an Android phone at full price and have been using it with prepaid plans. I activated it on day 1, and have all of Google's services despite not having a time-binding contract with a stupid telco. I have changed operators a few times, payed for 3G access, done a factory reset once, and used the phone when roaming. However, I have only needed to activate the phone once -- when I bought it.

Well, now it's has come to the point that Apple cannot announce activation numbers anymore. Android is overtaking much faster than anyone anticipated. It seems as though Apple can never get ahead no matter what they produce. Except for iTunes and iPod, everything else flames out or ends up 2nd, 3rd or stuck as a niche player.

You have to remember that android is on many times more dumb phones than smart phones and those are where the activations are. Apple does it with three versions of the same phone.
I wonder it google is counting the phones in china that run a hacked version of Android not even related to google?